


the game of passing

by kitashvi



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: F/M, i've abused my photoshop privileges, isis antagonizes seto while remaining both the bigger person and the better player, isis rattled some game pieces and seto came crashing through the wall like the kool-aid man, seto doesn't do so hot, seto tries very hard not to blow a gasket, this fic will teach you more about senet than you probably care to know, you've heard of card games now get ready for ancient egyptian 'sorry!'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-30
Updated: 2016-11-30
Packaged: 2018-09-01 05:48:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8611096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitashvi/pseuds/kitashvi
Summary: Seto Kaiba makes a series of poor choices and Isis plays a game she knows she won't lose.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EriksChampion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EriksChampion/gifts).



> **gah, this was a ride to write! here's hoping that in the fandom of a show about overly-involved card games, you'll be good with an overly-involved fic about board games. it's ended up more like pre-trustshipping and i hope that's alright, considering it's set in battle city**
> 
> **this was for YGOME16 for the lovely EriksChampion! i hope this was as dramatic and shippy as you'd wanted!**
> 
> **UPDATE: folk have been saying that the images aren't showing up on the fic itself. it's working for me on my laptop using firefox, but for those that the images aren't loading, i'd originally uploaded them[here](http://kit-vi.livejournal.com/2313.html) to move them over and you can look at the gameplay there! or, if you want to read the whole fic without flipping between two pages, it's also [here](http://kitashvi.tumblr.com/post/153934225926/the-game-of-passing) on our tumblr. sorry for the weird image issues!**

This is his blimp, Seto reminds himself, and therefore every room in the blimp is, in fact, _his_ room. His room which he, of course, can enter at any time. It being _his_ room, in _his_ blimp.

This is his blimp, Seto reminds himself as he walks past Isis’ room, stops, storms in and asks, “What the hell is that?”

Isis, possessing of significantly more poise than Seto or at least less exasperation at being rudely walked in on, arches an eyebrow and sets down the wooden pawn she’d been holding. Thirteen more like it lay scattered on the table next to a board game that looks startlingly like—”This is senet.”

She doesn’t elaborate, but she doesn’t need to. Seto clenches his teeth hard enough for a muscle to jump in his jaw and behind him, one of his assistants shifts from foot to foot. He shoos them away with an irritated wave and snaps, “That’s not possible.”

The corners of Isis’ lips tilt up and so does Seto’s blood pressure. “You’re hosting a tournament for a card game based on ancient magic, but senet is too much an improbability for you?”

“The rules—the _real_ rules—of senet were never discovered,” Seto counters, crossing his arms over his chest and straightening, looming over her and the table and Isis doesn’t so much as bat an eye. “I hadn’t chalked you up to play the make-believe version sold to _children_.”

“Seto,” she says, and the _presumption_ , like they’re old friends and not competitors, not strangers, “I’m the director of the Bureau of Archaeology in Egypt. I guarantee you this is anything but make-believe.” She spreads her hands on the tabletop, drums her fingers. The senet board rests in front her, illuminated in the light from the window. “I can show you, if you’d like.”

What he should do, Seto knows, is go back to his room and continue working on his deck—the tournament was due to start in less than two hours, there were a dozen ways that he could incorporate Obelisk into his deck, he has _work_ to do—

Seto takes three steps to the table and sits opposite her. “Do it.”

He watches her pluck a brown pawn, squat and rounded, from the table and roll it between her fingers. Isis arches an eyebrow and there it is, the trap Seto had been waiting for ever since they’d first met. Seto still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened in the museum; Mokuba had insisted he had been working too hard, was too stressed, too tired, had too active an imagination and needed more sleep and less coffee. He then rolled his eyes and helpfully suggested it had been hallucinogens in the museum air vents.

But Isis is anything but suspicious now, as she smiles and arranges the board between them. “It was customary to play senet with a wager.” She steeples her fingers and regards Seto from across the table with mild amusement. “Whoever wins can ask three questions that the loser must answer, what do you say?”

Seto scowls. “One question.”

“Two questions, then.”

“ _One_ question.”

Her lips twitch into a smile again, faint but there. “For a businessman, you don’t seem to understand how a negotiation works.”

Seto stands, shoving away from the table and across the room. “You have nothing I want.”

Isis waits to speak until he’s almost out the door and despite himself, Seto stops. “I have the original rules to a five thousand year old game.” She’s still smiling when he glares over his shoulder at her. “And the answers to any two questions you wish, provided you win.”

“Any two?” Seto drawls. “What if I asked you how many grains of sand there are in the world?”

The hand not twirling the pawn rises to the necklace resting on her collarbone. Isis taps the gold-wrought eye with a fingernail and stares over Seto’s shoulder for a moment, lost in thought. Finally, she shrugs, drops her fingers from the necklace, and rolls the pawn between her hands again. “You’ll just have to find out.”

Seto Kaiba is a billionaire. He is the CEO of a company that’s dominated the global gaming market and releases an average of five new products a year. He is hosting a dueling tournament that’s taken over an entire city and been broadcast about in one hundred and seven countries. He has an extensive, expensive research team at his disposal that can find him the original cuneiform tablet of the Royal Game of Ur, let alone the rules of senet—there is no such thing as _lost to time_ for Seto Kaiba.

Seto Kaiba, however, is also too competitive for his own good. He stalks back across the room and takes a seat across from Isis. “How do we play?”

Isis hold up the piece in her hand. “Two pawns each—mine brown, yours black. Traditionally each player has between five and seven, but that will take too long for us. We move the pawns across the board at the throw of four sticks, white side up. If all black sides are thrown, you move five spaces. Throwing a one, four, or five allows you to roll again.” She sets up the board, plucking the black pawn Seto had been examining right out of his hand. “Have I lost you?”

Seto grits his teeth. “Not yet.” Isis _winks_ at him and Seto can feel his pulse ticking in his jaw. “The four squares at the end—I haven’t seen those drawings before.”

Isis shrugs. “Each dynasty preferred different illustrations but the meanings remain the same.” She taps the ankh engraved on the fifteenth square. “The House of Rebirth, where pawns return to restart. The vulture here is the House of Happiness—it’s a mandatory square for all pawns. After it is the House of Waters, and if—”

“And if you land there you return to the House of Rebirth,” Seto finishes, prickling at the lecture. “After that is the House of Three Truths, where you need to throw a three to leave the board, and the House of Re-Atum, where you need to throw a two.” If anything, Isis doesn’t seem irritated at the interruption. She arches an eyebrow and Seto scowls. “I know these rules.”

Isis sweeps the sticks off the table and rattles them. “Then let’s begin.”

Her first throw gives her a two and she makes the only move available to her, skipping over Seto’s first piece with a muted _clack_ of wood on wood and passing him the sticks with her other hand. Seto pauses out of habit, used to games where he needed to consider his strategy first instead of relying on the luck of the draw. And yet, it’s in his favor; the sticks clatter to a stop with all four white sides up, which means—

“You get to throw again,” Isis tells him before he’s even finished moving his first pawn, like he’s a novice or a _child_. Seto thinks he keeps his expression schooled into something neutral and impassive but his irritation must show. Isis picks up the sticks. “If you know the rules, why were you so intent on having me teach you?”

“I wasn’t _intent_ ,” Seto snaps, setting his second pawn down right behind Isis’ first. “I just thought you had something worth my time.”

“You can leave if you’d like,” she tells him, still smiling, “since I know you have so much work to do,” and there’s a glint in her eye like she’s reading his mind and not just making an educated assumption about his schedule. Seto scoffs and says nothing, just leans back in his chair and waits. The next two moves are hers—Isis throws one first, and steps her pawn away from Seto’s. It warrants her another toss and Seto watches in mounting disbelief as Isis belies every ounce of serene benevolence he’d thought she had as she throws a three and _switches places with his pawn_ , shunting him back to the beginning.

She’s speaking again, Seto notes through the haze of sheer, irrational fury—he’d expect that level of pettiness from someone like Jounouchi; she could have easily outpaced his pawns entirely but instead she chose to rile him—“I understand needing a distraction before an important event,” she murmurs, studying the board.

“I don’t need to be distracted!” His voice is too loud, too angry for the game they’re obviously playing—not just senet, not anymore. By the door, one of his assistants flinches and anxiously checks his watch. The contestants should be done with dinner by now.

Isis doesn’t seem bothered by either his outburst or their time constraints when she slides the sticks back toward him. “If you say so.”  

Seto scowls but doesn’t rise to the jibe. He throws a three and Isis does too; he nets a three again and she throws a two and he loses himself in the flow of it, relishing despite himself the change of pace from shuffling through his deck, calculating endless combinations for Obelisk. Their pawns amble down the board and Seto notices how her hand keeps straying to her necklace almost absently before she moves a pawn, an unconscious habit Seto picks up while she doesn’t and he’s all the more smug for it. And yet, cold steals down his spine. He remembers the museum, the _visions_ —no, the _hallucinations_ , brought on by exhaustion or stress or corporate sabotage or literally anything besides Ancient Egyptian witchcraft and Seto ignores the way his ears ring when he looks at it, the way the golden eye seems to look right back.

“So,” he starts, moving his pawn down one square and picking up the sticks for his extra throw, “is there a particular jeweler with terrible taste in Egypt who made your necklace, or it is part of a brand I don’t know?”

It’s a joke, obviously, there isn’t a damn thing Seto doesn’t know or can’t find out, but Isis pauses. Her fingers stop their absent drumming against the chain across her collarbone as if she had only just realized she was doing it, and she lowers her hand. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know.”

Seto smirks. “I just find it strange—if it’s not _coincidence_ that Yugi and I are dueling tonight then I doubt it’s _coincidence_ that the director of the Bureau of Egyptian Archaeology and the grandson of an Egyptologist have the same taste in tacky jewelry.” He moves his pawn two more spaces and relinquishes his turn.

He expects her to be frazzled, caught off guard at his perception, mildly unnerved at _least_ , but Isis chuckles. Two of the sticks clatters upright and she hopscotches one of her pawns over the other. “I would save that question,” she tells him. “You haven’t won yet.”

She’s not wrong—they’re both miles away from winning and Seto can see his assistant check his watch for the third time in as many minutes. His next throw is a two as well and Seto can’t help the grin as his pawn steps over the House of Rebirth. His pawn is the only one on the second row, the only one past the first required checkpoint, and while Isis may sit pretty and smile and play her games, Seto’s going to wipe that smug look off her face and win himself a couple goddamn explanations while he’s at it.

It’s like she _knows_ , Seto thinks a moment later when four black lacquer pieces glint at him from across the tabletop. Her pawn moves five spaces to join his on the second row, gaining steadily on his lead and Seto watches, concerned—not nervous, _never_ nervous, a Kaiba doesn’t know the meaning of the word—as Isis throws again and gets a three.

Seto looks at Isis. Isis looks at Seto. Isis looks back at the board and Seto contemplates homicide.

She _wouldn’t._

Isis reaches for their pawns and switches Seto’s for hers, puts herself in the lead and ducks her head like she thinks Seto can’t see the way she’s trying not laugh.

Seto says nothing, doesn’t trust himself to open his mouth and still remain civil because after all, it is her god card in his back pocket. Instead, he snatches the sticks off the table and throws. He has a brief, ludicrous second where he wonders if he shouldn’t believe in the heart of the sticks or something else equally trite, wonders if Yugi has any motivational speech custom-tailored to this exact situation, and he drops the sticks and watches—

as—

they—

clatter to a stop. Three stripes of shiny white stare back at Seto and maybe there is something to that sappy bullshit after all. He resolves to tell Yugi all about it later when he’s mopping the floor with him during their duel. But in the meantime—

Mokuba once told him that there wasn’t a single petty bone in Seto’s body. That’s because, he went on to elaborate, Seto is composed almost entirely of pure, concentrated spite let alone being concerned about individual _bones_ , and Seto can’t help but agree as he plucks the same pawns Isis had just moved and switches them right back.

Seto glances back at Isis with something almost akin to glee—she must be furious, livid at this turn of events. Seto’s still in the lead and their time is running out; they’ve all-but abandoned their pawns still on the first row, scrambling to at least reach the finish line with one and win by default. But Isis doesn’t even seem to _care_ , tapping her finger on one of the thrown sticks and considering the board. Seto’s glee sours as Isis throws a two and doesn’t even remotely acknowledge his previous move.

“Speaking of coincidences and,” she pauses, shakes her head and chuckles, “ _tacky jewelry_ , have you thought more on what we spoke about, back in the museum?”

“No,” Seto lies, and her eyes flick up to meet his. She smiles before glancing back down and finally moving her pawn up right behind his.

As they play, Seto finds himself looking more at Isis than he does at the board, more invested in her response to him winning than he actually is in _winning the game._ And he _is_ winning now, throwing first a four and chasing it with a three. It puts him firmly in the third row and leagues ahead of Isis. He sees her looking at him when he looks down at the board but she glances away before he can catch her eyes on him. And she—smells nice? It’s an inane, ridiculous thing for Seto to notice but he tries to place the smell anyway. It’s a lovely perfume, he thinks as she reaches past him for the sticks before recalling that she was an _enemy_ and a—

Seto jerks up to look at her, eyes narrowed, and she pauses halfway through her throw. “Why did you have this board set up?”

Isis arches an eyebrow. “This is my room. I was under the impression I could do what I pleased in it.” She holds up a hand to stop Seto before he can snap about who, exactly, own this room. “And this board is a gift from my brother.”

“So you sometimes take it and reminisce about the good old days?”

She doesn’t frown or scowl or furrow her brows, but something in her expression shutters. “I haven’t seen my brother in years. I’m sure you can imagine how terrible that can feel.”

He’s more angry than he is cowed, hates that she can just do this, spin his words and make him feel guilty like he’s a _child_ , but something about this entire situation rubs him the wrong way. “Did you—” Seto pauses, acknowledges how _ridiculous_ this is going to sound, and continues with his thought anyway, “did you _know_ I would be walking by?”

Isis throws a five and then a four and eclipses Seto’s pawn before she answers. “You’re a busy man, Seto.” Her final throw of the turn lands her right on the House of Happiness and Seto realizes he’s in deep shit. “I’m sure you walking by was just a coincidence.”

It’s not over yet. He casts the sticks and they come up with a two, and he moves his pawn right behind Isis’s. He’s pulled out far-flung victories before and there’s so many ways this could end in his favor—for Isis, the next square was the House of Waters and it would set her pawn back straight to the House of Rebirth, and beyond that she needed specific throws to maneuver off the board. He has time, Seto insists, Seto _knows_ , and he takes a deep breath and hands the sticks back over to Isis. Their fingers brush with a crackle of static and Seto’s hair stands on end. This may be his room, his blimp, but he’s beginning to realize this game is all hers.

Isis throws a two and skips straight to the House of Three Truths and Seto understands that he’s been _played._

“It’s your move,” Isis tells him, like it matters, like he wasn’t dead in the water the minute he set foot across the threshold and it taste like salt and iron—even with Yugi, even until the last minute, he’s always stood a chance, there’s always been an opportunity to save his skin. Senet is, primarily, a game of luck before it’s a game of strategy, but Seto has the sinking suspicion he knows exactly how the sticks will land. Seto throws a one and lands on the House of Happiness.

He throws again. A one again. It’s—“The House of Waters.”

Isis says nothing but she moves his pawn for him, setting it back on the House of Rebirth before picking up the sticks.

“You saw this coming.” He means it as a question.

Isis smiles, throws a perfect three and moves her pawn off the board. Her hand is back, tracing the outline of her necklace. “I wouldn’t say that.”

Seto could leave. He could get up, get out, get back on with his life, his tournament, like this little debacle had never happened. It’s a crooked game, after all, and he owes her nothing. But instead he leans back in his seat, spreads his fingers wide on the tabletop. “Get on with it.”

Isis takes her sweet time, putting away the pieces and wrapping the board in muslin. “You like me,” she says.

Seto bristles, shoulders tightening. “Is that one of your questions?”

Isis smiles, taps her necklace. “It’s not a question.”

His employees should thank all their lucky stars, Seto decides, that his back is to them and they can’t see the flush that creeps across his cheeks because _how dare she_. Isis reaches across the table and takes his hand in hers, flips it over and traces the lines on his palm. “Did you ever actually intend to return my god card to me?”

Seto’s frozen, bewitched. It takes him a moment to respond. “I—of course.” It’s not a lie, is it, if he’s not certain what exactly is the truth?

Isis shrugs, fingers still tap-tap-tapping on his palm. “Well,” she says, “I suppose an honest answer wasn’t part of our wager.”

Seto tears his hand away and jerks up hard enough that his chair goes clattering backward. His assistants all jump to attention as he storms past them, blows out of the room and doesn’t look back. What _bullshit_ , what waste of time that he could’ve spent perfecting his deck or programming the arena or doing literally anything but falling prey to a cheap parlor trick to rattle him, to knock him down a peg in order to have a better shot at the title—

Her voice carries in a way that’s physically _impossible_ , because Seto knows she hasn’t moved, can still see her half-moonlit at the table where he left her even though he’s halfway down the hall, but she sounds like she’s speaking right next to him. “I’ll hold one question in reserve, then,” comes her voice in his ear like _magic_ , “until the next time we play.”

Seto says nothing in return. He has a tournament to win.

**Author's Note:**

> **the true, _official_ rules of senet have, in fact, been lost to time, and a number of different restorations have been translated and marketed. the board image i used came from [this](http://www.startwithabook.org/content/pdfs/EgyptianSenetGame.pdf) pdf, though the rules i've used are ones that i play with (i don't really remember where i learned them), and the play-through of seto and isis' game was made in photoshop **
> 
> **i hope you liked the fic! it went through more edits than perhaps it should have with all of the extensions YGOME had, but i think it turned out well. we're on tumblr with the same username if you want to come scream about yugioh with us!**


End file.
